Transcripts
1. Introduction: In today's fast-
paced digital age, attention spans are
shorter than ever. People skim, scroll, and
swipe at lightning speed. How do you capture
their attention and convey your
message effectively? The answer is simple - clarity. Hello, my name is
Ruth. Welcome to my digital copyrighting class. Throughout my career as a
professional copywriter, I've gathered a toolkit
of techniques that make digital writing
clear and persuasive. In this class, I'll share
these tools with you. You'll learn, practice and rewrite a piece of
your own web copy, transforming it into a
clear and compelling piece. If you're looking for a
practical overview of basic digital copywriting
skills, this class is for you. You don't need any prior
knowledge or experience, just an appetite to
improve your writing. Don't worry if terms like active voice or adverbs
sound confusing now. I'll break them down
with practical examples, making them easy to
grasp and apply. Whether you're crafting blogs, website content, or
social media posts, you're in the right place. The best part? As you practice, these techniques will
become second nature, elevating all your
future writings. Your voice matters. Let's make it clear
and compelling.
2. Class and Project Overview: By the end of this lesson, you'll have a
comprehensive toolkit to squeeze every bit of
value from this class. I'll walk you through
the different topics we'll be covering, the structure of each
lesson, your class project, and the resources I've got lined up to support
your learning. We're going to start by talking about the most important
person in your life - as far as digital copywriting
is concerned - your reader. You'll learn how understanding
your audience is at the heart of digital
copyrighting success. We'll look at how to
write consistently short, sharp sentences that keep your reader's attention.
Before examining how a simple tweak
from the passive to the active voice can instantly make your writing more engaging. Next, we'll unlock the
secrets of adverbs. Run through a few SEO
copywriting basics. Explore the hidden power
of the words "you" and "I", and the pitfalls
of nominalisation, as well as harnessing directness to make your copy
more persuasive. We'll then polish your
skills by editing your work until it
shines, before finishing up with a toolbox of
useful tips and tricks to take your digital copyrighting
to the next level. At this point, I'd
like to introduce you to the Clarify Your
Copy worksheet. You can download
this worksheet from the class Description
or Resources tab. You'll use it to
complete your project. And I'm going to work through an example project during this class so you can
see it in action. For your project, I'd like
you to choose a piece of copy that you've written
and you'd like to improve. It should be between
about 50 to 200 words. Your social media bio or the About Page of your
website would be ideal. For my example, I'm going to use some website copy sent to
me by a fictional client, Lois. Lois owns a local flower shop
called The Flower Yard. She sent me some draft text for the About Page of her website
and I'm going to edit it so it's as clear
as possible using the exact same techniques I'll be teaching
you in this class. Before you move on
to the next lesson, remember to download or
print out your worksheet. We're going to start by setting a strong foundation by getting to know our reader.
Let's get to it.
3. Know Your Audience: Writing clearly means
understanding your audience. Let's start by looking
at three ways clear copy benefits
all audiences, regardless of your website's
niche or industry. Firstly, clarity ensures your message resonates
with everyone, including non native
English speakers. When you're considering
your audience, think about how your words will be understood universally. Second, clarity
boosts engagement. When your content
speaks directly to your audience's needs and
is easy to understand, they're more likely to engage, share, and return for more. This is why understanding the motivation of your
readers is crucial. And thirdly, clarity
builds trust. When people understand your
message, they trust you more. In the digital world, trust is invaluable. When you're clear about
your writing's purpose and who it's for, You're building a foundation
of trust with your readers. With those universal
rules in mind, now it's time to consider your
website specific audience. It's impossible to write clearly and effectively
if you're at all unclear about who
you're writing for or what the purpose of
your writing is. That might sound pretty obvious, but you'd be surprised
how many people start writing something
like a webpage or a social media post without considering their audience
or their end goal. For each piece of
copy that you write, ask yourself, who is
going to be reading this? Why are they reading it? And how can I help them
achieve what they want? You might find it
helpful to visualize an actual person who will
be reading your copy. If you're writing web copy
aimed at potential customers, you can imagine your typical target customer when
you're writing. This is a technique I
use and I find it a great way to keep my copy
personal and relevant. Lois has done her homework. She's identified her readers as existing and potential
customers of her flower shop. They're motivated
by their need for professional flowers and
flower arrangements, and she can help them
achieve that by selling a range of beautiful
value for money flowers. With that in mind,
the content of her About Page text is looking good overall. She talks
a little about the history of her business
and her own experience. Then she gives an overview
of the services The Flower Yard offers and
what makes them unique. She then goes on to talk about the company's customer
service ethos, and she ends on a
call to action. There's just one
thing that's not right here in terms of content. And that's this sentence about
Lois's puppetry business. That's nothing to do
with her flower shop. And it's information
that just isn't relevant to the
readers of this page. Let's get rid of it. That might seem like a really
obvious error to you, but it is amazing how
often people include irrelevant information just
like this in their copy. That's why it's
so important that you answer the three
questions of who, why, and how to focus your
copy on what's relevant. And it all starts with
knowing your reader. So now that we've got
the basic content of our piece of writing correct, let's work through the clear
copy principles to make the copy itself as clear
and concise as possible.
4. Short, Sharp Sentences: Long, rambling sentences are
a feature of bad writing. They're confusing and
they're difficult to read. A good rule of
thumb is to aim for an average sentence
length of 15 to 20 words. That doesn't mean that all of your sentences should
be the same length. In fact, varying the length of your sentences will keep
your reader interested. But anything over 30
words just has to go. The good news is that
long sentences are relatively easy to
identify and eliminate. One good way of spotting
if a sentence is too long is to read
your copy out loud. I call it the 'Take
a Breath Test'. If you find yourself short of breath while you're
reading your copy, that's a sure sign that a few more full stops
wouldn't go amiss. Another warning sign is if,
when you scan your copy, you see a lot of connecting
words such as "and" and "but" and "because", or if there are a lot of commas. Finally, most word
processing programs count your words for you. If you're not sure how many
words are in a sentence, you can highlight that sentence and the number of
words will be shown somewhere on the screen. So, you've
found those long sentences. Now, how do you go
about shortening them? Let's use that copy from The
Flower Yard as an example. I'm going to try reading this
first sentence out loud. Feel free to join
in. The Flower Yard is a flower shop in Leicester, conveniently located in the city's vibrant and
colourful cultural quarter that was established in 2014 by local florist and
entrepreneur Lois Spires, who had her education at the Institute of
Professional Floristry, and already had over a decade
of experience in the trade. That sentence is
definitely too long. Not only am I running
out of breath saying it, but I'm also getting confused. For example, was it
the flower shop or the cultural quarter that was established in 2014?
It's not clear. Let's add some full stops at natural points between ideas, and now let's amend the
words at the beginnings of our new sentences so
that they make sense. That's better. If we
read it through again, it's already much clearer. If we carry on reading
through the text, we get to this sentence, and
alarm bells start ringing because we've got a lot of
connecting words. We've got "so" and "and" and "and" again. Let's try getting rid of
that middle "and" and replacing it
with a full stop. And we'll adjust the
start of the sentence so it makes sense. That was easy. The passage is now
much easier to read. The one way of finding long
sentences we haven't tried yet is using the word count
function on Microsoft Word. Let's give that a go on
this final paragraph. If I highlight the words
up to the first full stop, it tells me at the
bottom here that it has ten words in
it. That's fine. Well below our minimum
30 world threshold. This next one is 13, and the next one is
20. They're all fine. But then we get
to this sentence, which is far too
long at 51 words. Let's break that sentence up and tweak the beginnings
of our new sentences like we did before. We've used three methods to spot
overly long sentences, reading out loud, looking
out for connecting words, and checking using the word
count on our computer. Our sentences are now
all below 30 words. Time to move on to the
next clear copy principle.
5. The Active Voice: Using the active voice makes your writing more
direct and impactful. The active voice describes
a sentence where the subject performs the
action stated by the verb. It follows a clear subject,
verb, object format. That simplicity makes
it easy to read. Using the passive voice
on the other hand, makes for murky,
roundabout sentences. With the passive
voice, the subject is acted upon by the verb. Don't worry if
you're not 100% sure about the subject,
verb, object thing, you'll be able to
see exactly what I mean when we look
at a few examples. Here are some sentences written first in
the passive voice, then in the active voice. With the passive voice, the doer comes after the
thing that was done. Another way to spot
the passive voice is to look out for forms of 'to be' followed by a past
participle. To recap, to identify passive voice, look at what
happened and look at who was responsible
for doing it. If the personal or thing responsible for doing
the action is either not there or turns up in the sentence after the
thing that happened, and if you see a past
participle straight after a form of 'to be',
it's passive voice. In the first example, it's the company that won the award, but the company comes
after the award in the sentence. There's also the past participle of 'to be'
in the form of "was won by". That's the passive voice.
Now, what's wrong with it? Well, you can see
straight away that the active version comes across as more natural and
straightforward. On the other hand,
the passive examples are more bureaucratic
and long winded. Writing more complex
sentences in the passive voice can also become really confusing
for the reader. Luckily, once you've
identified the passive voice, it's really easy to fix. I've highlighted where
the passive voice has been used in
the example text. Now it's just a case of working
through each sentence and reworking it so that the doer is at the
start of the sentence. Then the action, then
the thing being done. This sentence is in
the passive voice. The doer is Lois, and she comes after the verb "established". To change it
into the active voice, I'm going to swap
it around so we have Lois establishing
the business. Can you spot the next one? It's this sentence here, and I'm going to swap it
around in the same way. Notice how the words themselves
change only a little. It's mainly the order
they're in that changes. There are two sentences in this last paragraph that are written in the
passive voice. Think about how you'd change them. You'll be able to see
how I fix them when we revisit the text
in the next lesson. Before we finish with
the passive voice, I do want to add
in a disclaimer. Because the passive
voice isn't always bad. There are times that
can be quite useful. One of these is if the doer of a particular thing
is unimportant. For example, if you wanted to say that a book had
been published, the book itself might be the most important
thing In the sentence, the name of the publisher
is unimportant. You might say "the book
was published" instead of "Oxford Press
published the book". Similarly, if you don't
know who the doer is, you can avoid mentioning them completely by using
the passive voice. Finally, it can be helpful to have the occasional
sentence in the passive voice to break up text and stop it
getting too monotonous. So, don't think that
the passive voice always equals bad writing. It's just a handy general rule to stick to the active
voice whenever you can. On average, aim to make 80% to 90% of your
sentences active.
6. Trash the Adverbs: What is an adverb? And what have I got against them anyway? Put simply, an adverb
modifies a verb or an adjective to tell you
how someone did something. And they're not always bad news, but they are often overused, and if you struggle to keep your
copy clear and concise, trashing a few adverbs is probably going to
improve your writing. There are a few different
types of adverbs, but the type that it's
most important to check and consider deleting
are easily identified. That's because they almost
always end in the letters LY. I've highlighted all of the
LY adverbs in Lois's text. Have a look at them. Remember
what I said about adverbs modifying the word after it to tell you how something was done? Do you agree that these adverbs
are weakening the phrases they're part of and making them vaguer and
more long-winded? Let's go through them and see if they really need to be there. First, we have the
word "conveniently" to describe the
location of the shop. I don't think this is needed. We've told our readers
where the shop is. They can decide for
themselves whether or not it's convenient for
them. Let's delete it. In this paragraph,
we have the words "enthusiastically" and "proudly" to describe the way The
Flower Yard works. Again, I don't think these words add anything or tell
us anything new. I think The Flower Yard are communicating their
enthusiasm and pride effectively and subtly
without having to overtly tell people
they are those things. For the sake of
clarity, I'm going to delete those two. Now we have this phrase
"continuously tries". This is a good example of where we can
strengthen the verb, in this case, "tries", and in doing so, make the adverb that comes
before it unnecessary. What's a stronger
word for "tries"? How about "strives"? With that nice strong
verb in place, we can get rid of the adverb
without losing any meaning. Getting rid of those adverbs
was easy and it's made our writing feel much more
direct and professional. Stay tuned for the next lesson where we'll demystify
the world of SEO copywriting and why it's all about clarity
and reader focus.
7. SEO Copywriting Basics: In this lesson, we'll
cover the essentials of a crucial aspect of
digital copywriting. SEO or search engine
optimisation. At its core, SEO copywriting
is all about clarity. It's the art and science of
making your content easily discoverable by search engines and by extension,
your target audience. Imagine you're searching
for a local flower shop. You might type "best flower
shop near me" into Google. Now, as the owner of The
Flower Yard website, Lois wants her business to appear at the top of
those search results. This is where SEO
copywriting comes into play. Keywords are the
backbone of SEO. These are the terms or
phrases people type into search engines. For The
Flower Yard website, potential keywords
could be "fresh roses", "wedding bouquets", or "flower
delivery in Leicester". By incorporating these keywords naturally into her web copy, search engines will
recognise that her content is relevant to people
searching for those terms. However, it's not just about sprinkling
keywords everywhere. Google and other search
engines are smart. They prioritise content that is genuinely useful and
relevant to users. While you should use keywords, it's essential to
ensure your content remains engaging and
valuable to your readers. Next, consider the meta title
and meta description. These are the title and
snippets of texts that appear in the search engine results.
for The Flower Yard, a compelling meta
title could be, "The Flower Yard: Fresh roses
and bouquets in Leicester". A meta description
might be, "Discover fresh roses, beautiful bouquets, and speedy flower delivery at The Flower Yard in Leicester. Perfect for all occasions." This not only tells
search engines what your page is about, but also entices potential customers to
click on your link. Another key element is
internal and external linking. By linking to other
relevant pages, like The Flower Yard's wedding bouquets page,
on your website, you guide both
search engines and visitors to more
of your content. External links on
the other hand, are links to other
reputable websites. These can boost your
site's credibility in the eyes of search engines. Lastly, always prioritise readability and user experience. A well structured, easy to read page not only keeps
your readers engaged, but also signals to search engines that your
site is user friendly. If you're eager to master the
art of writing web copy that both engages readers and
ranks high on search engines, I invite you to join my class, SEO Copywriting for
Digital Marketing Success. It's a comprehensive guide
that will equip you with all the tools and
knowledge you need to excel in the world
of SEO copywriting. Don't go anywhere
just yet though! If there's one thing that
both potential customers and search engines love, it's clear, concise, copy. And I've got plenty more
techniques lined up for you in this class that
you won't want to miss. In the next lesson, we're getting personal.
8. You and I: Your words will be read by
individual human beings, not by machines, demographic
groups, or organisations. That sounds pretty
obvious, doesn't it? But how many websites, letters, and forms have you read that sound like they
were written by robots, for robots. I've read plenty. One thing that makes
writing sounds stilted and formal is when you use the
third person too much. When you write from a
third person perspective, you write as if both you and your reader were unconnected, objective observers of
whatever you're writing about. Imagine if I was sat
here saying "Ruth wants her student to stop writing
in the third person". No, I want YOU to stop
writing in the third person. And you're going to do it by identifying when you're using the third person
and killing it with three simple words: "you", "I" and "we". Take a look at
these examples. The sentences on the left are written in the third person. They talk about people
and things as if they were remote from both the
writer and the reader. Compare them with the
sentences on the right. They speak directly from
the writer to the reader. They're warmer and feel
more direct and personal. Let's look at how this
works in practice, using The Flower Yard
copy as an example. Because, as you'll see, you can't just ditch the third
person completely. You need to use it carefully
to keep your writing clear At the moment the entire text is written in the third
person. It makes sense in this first paragraph. We're introducing The
Flower Yard very broadly. We want to make sure that people know what we're talking about. But it gets very tedious
later on when we see this constant repetition
of The Flower Yard this and The Flower Yard that. What we need to do is switch at some point
to the first person "we'. There's a
clever trick we can employ to do just that
without confusing people. Look at the start
of this sentence, "The Flower Yard creates". Let's rephrase that
so that it reads, "At The Flower Yard, we create". Now that we've announced
that shift in perspective, we can use "we" in the place of The Flower Yard throughout
the rest of the text. The only other thing we need
to bear in mind is that The Flower Yard is singular,
whereas "we" is plural. So we need to make sure we tweak other words in the
sentence to reflect that. For example, "it utilises" with an S at the
end, becomes "we utilise" without the S. that's already made
a big difference. Now remember at the beginning of this class where we
identified our reader? In this case, we know that the readers of our copy
will be customers. Instead of referring to "customers" as if
they're somewhere and someone else we should use "you"
whenever we refer to them. One final thing for
us to consider is how Lois refers to
herself in this copy. Things can get a little
confusing if you use "I" and "we" in the same
piece of text. That's why I'm not
suggesting that we do a similar transition to the first person from
the third person "Lois" in this first paragraph. It would be too much for this short piece of writing to bear. There are ways
around this, though. One would be to have a separate boxed off biography
section where Lois could talk more directly to her readers using
the first person. Another would be to
have a quote from Lois with her name underneath
or "Lois said", and then her words
as a quote. As it is, for simplicity's
sake, I think we're best leaving this section
alone in this case. However, if "we" isn't
getting in the way, if you're writing from
your own point of view or on your
own personal blog, or you're writing your social
media bio for example, I'd strongly suggest
using the first person. I always find it
jarring when I'm on someone's personal website or social media account and
they're referring to themselves by their name as
if they were someone else. As a general rule use "i" when
you're talking about yourself. I hope you'll agree that that
one simple rule does have a dramatically positive
effect on our copy. The next one is going
to help us even more.
9. Find the Right Words: If you only take one thing away from this class,
I'd like it to be to always write with your
reader in mind. That's something that applies
to the individual words that you use when
you're writing as well. Every career or
industry or hobby has its own specialist
language, its own jargon. If you're writing
for other people within that specialist group, it's fine to use that
kind of language because they're
going to understand exactly what you're
talking about. But one big mistake
that a lot of people make is when they're writing
for a broader audience, they continue using that
insider industry jargon. It's not appropriate in that
case because the reader, the general public, isn't
going to understand it. If we look again at that
copy from The Flower Yard, we can see that this
is a mistake that Lois has made on her About page. Do you know what
a boutonnier is? How about an ikebana? I have no idea, and I bet very few people outside the floristry
business know either. Lois has forgotten her
reader here and is using industry jargon when she's writing for the general public. I'm going to replace those words with some more everyday ones. That's my first tip on
using the right words. Avoid industry specific jargon. If you are writing about something you know very
well and you're not sure if a word or phrase
is jargon or not, the best way to find
out is to ask someone who's unfamiliar with whatever it is you're writing about. I'm pretty sure that
if Lois had asked any non-florist if they
knew what a boutonnier was, they would have told
her they didn't. It's not just jargon words that you need to eliminate from your writing. Language Tip number two is don't
use complicated words when there's a
simpler alternative that means the same thing. Here are some examples to
show you the kind of thing. I mean. You might
think that using a fancy sounding word makes you seem like
a better writer, but I'm afraid the
opposite is true. Dressing up, standard
business writing with fussy words is like dressing up a pig in a pair of
frilly pink knickers. It's not big, it's not clever, and it confuses people. Let's swap these silly
formal words that Lois has used for some
much simpler ones. Utilise becomes use. Assured becomes sure. Purchase becomes buy.
Exigent becomes urgent. Require becomes need. And
affable becomes friendly. That's a lot better. Let's move on to the next clear
copy principle.
10. Don't Nominalise: A nominalisation is a noun that
isn't a physical object. It might be a process,
or a technique, or an emotion, and it's
formed from a verb. Now this is one of
those occasions where seeing a couple of examples is going to be far more useful than hearing
me explain it. So let's take a look.
See what I mean. The words in the left
hand column are nouns. They're static things. The words in the right
hand column are verbs. They're active 'doing' words. Nominalisations often
end in ION or MNT. They're very common
and very useful. In fact, the English language
would be lost without them. There's nothing wrong
with nominalisations when they're used sparingly. However, too many of them
in a piece of writing can make it academic,
stilted, and dull. Often, things can be livened up by rephrasing the sentence so that you replace
the nominalisation with the original verb. Here are a few examples. See how the sentences that use the original verb
are easier to read, clearer and more vibrant than the ones that use
the nominalisation? Let's look at Lois' text. I've highlighted the
nominalisations. The phrase, "Lois had her
education" is quite clumsy. We can improve it and
replace the nominalisation with the verb by saying
"Lois was educated". But I think we can
improve it even more by using a synonym and
saying "Lois trained". That's much clearer and simpler. I'm going to jump forward
to this sentence with the nominalisation
"discussion" in it. What if we use the verb instead of the
nominalisation and say, "it's why we take the
time to discuss what you need in detail"?
That's better. But the word "discuss"
is still a bit fussy. How about we replace
it with "talk through". That sounds more
informal and friendly. The other nominalisations in the text I'm going
to leave alone. They're not hindering
the clarity and there's no straightforward way of replacing them with
their original verb. That's nominalisations
in a nutshell: Limit your use of them, but there's no need to get
rid of them completely. Well, our copy is getting clearer and more
concise all the time. We've got just a few more steps to go to make it crystal clear. Let's not waste any time because our next principle is all about being direct and to the point.
11. Be Direct: Nobody wants to come across
as rude or abrupt or curt. And that's one of the
reasons why we so often clog up and
slow down our copy by adding fussy polite words and phrases that don't
need to be there, instead of getting
straight to the point. In fact, the politest
thing we can do from our readers
point of view is get our message across
as succinctly as possible rather than wasting
their time. That's rude. So write confidently and don't be afraid to give
direct instructions. Let's look at a few examples. I'm sure you recognise
a few of these from official letters and
forms you've been sent. Isn't it better
when people get to the point and say
exactly what they mean? It's especially
important in situations like these where you're asking
someone to do something. And a good example of
that is a call to action. I'm sure you know
that you should have one clear call to action at
the end of each web page. If we look at Lois's copy, we can see that there
is a call to action. She wants people to
visit her services page. But it's wrapped up in this
polite, fussy language. It's not necessary,
and it's also not expected in web
copy in particular. Let's clear that up by getting rid of these unneeded words. There's another way
that unnecessary extra words can get in
the way of your message. That's when you
say the same thing twice. You make your point. And just to be on the safe side, you say it again in a
slightly different way. Now, people do this
in conversation all the time and it
doesn't matter too much. But when you do it in your copy, you risk your reader getting bored and going off
to do something else before they've even got to your all important
call to action. Lois has been guilty of
this in a couple of places, but only on a small scale. She hasn't repeated phrases, but she has used
more than one word that means the same thing. If we pick either
"vibrant" or "colourful", this sentence will be
quicker to read and clearer. The same goes for "taste,
inclination, and preference". They all mean more or
less the same thing. Let's make life easier
for our readers by picking just one of those
words and deleting the others. Just as using more
complicated words where simple ones will do
doesn't make you look clever, neither does using more words
that mean the same thing. It all just makes
your writing fussy, long-winded and tedious to read. Isn't our writing
looking better? There's just one small
but important step left before we're
ready to publish it.
12. Polish Your Copy: Nobody likes a smug
grammar pedant. If you're getting your
message across clearly, the odd misspelt word or grammatical faux pas
is not a big deal. However, nothing
interferes with clarity like a confusing or funny typo. And there's nothing worse than realising that an
important piece of copy on your website or
social media bio has had a typo on it for months
and you didn't realise. Let's look at how we avoid that. Well, what you shouldn't do is rely on your computer's
spellcheck, because sometimes a word
is in the dictionary, but it's not the word you meant, and a spellcheck isn't
going to pick that up. The secret to spotting those tricky little errors
is proper proofreading. Here are my top three tips
for proofreading your copy. First, check the spelling
of proper nouns, that's the names of
people, businesses, and addresses,
particularly carefully. These won't be picked up
by spellcheck either. You'll need to double
check them yourself. Second, print it out. There's something about
reading your words on paper that makes errors jump
out of the page at you. Finally, ask a
friend to read it. Sometimes you're so
close to your copy, it's difficult to
view it objectively, but someone else can
spot any errors easily. I've done a careful check of The Flower Yard's
About page copy, and I've spotted
three errors that would never have been picked
up by a spellchecker. I've just looked up
this organisation, the Institute of
Professional Floristry, just by doing a
quick Google search and finding their website. And it turns out that it's not the Institute of Professional
FLORISTRY at all, but the Institute of
Professional FLORISTS. That's an easy mistake to make. But getting the name of your professional membership
body incorrect on your website has the potential to make you
look very unprofessional. So it's good that
we've spotted it. And we did so just by
paying a bit of extra attention to
our proper nouns to make sure they were correct. You can probably see the problem with the other two
highlighted words. Male and flora are
both valid words, but they're incorrect here. Male should be spelt M, A, I, L, and flora needs
an L on the end. Those are the most
common kind of errors you'll find
when proofreading. And they can be found
and corrected with the three step plan I
told you about earlier. Check proper nouns, print
it out, and ask a friend. Now, this copy isn't perfect, but it is a huge improvement
on what we started with. In less than ten simple steps, we've taken a piece
of text from unclear, confusing, and rambling
to clear and concise. Using the same
straightforward process, you can transform your own copy. We'll finish by looking at some free online
resources and tools that will help you even further on your quest for crystal
clear web copy.
13. Tips, Tricks and Tools: In this class, you've learned how to improve your writing and get your message across
clearly and persuasively. I hope that what
you've learned has given you the confidence to spot those warning signs of bad
writing and to address them. But sometimes we all need
a little extra help. Now I'm going to
introduce you to some free online
resources and tools that are going to be incredibly useful to you As you
practice your new skills. You can find links to all of these resources on
the class about page. These are tools I use
myself in my career as a professional copywriter and I know you're going to
find them useful too. The Plain English Campaign is the ultimate guardian of
clear, concise language. Their website has
downloadable guides on everything from
how to write in plain English to A-Zs of financial terms
and legal phrases. There are tips for how to write
a bibliography or a form, and special guidance on
writing letters and emails. This is definitely a website you need in your bookmarks bar. Here's another: The website of the Oxford English Dictionary. This is my go to dictionary when I need to check the
spelling of something. But it's much more than that. There's also a comprehensive thesaurus and a grammar guide. If you're interested in word
origins or geeky word facts, their blog is well worth
a read too. Next up, and this is the big
one, meet Hemingway. This is the number one big
daddy of copywriting tools. And it's completely free. If you copy and paste
your text into Hemingway, it will check it for
common writing errors. The aim is to make your copy as bold and clear as possible. You can see the things it checks for on the right hand side, and some of them are going
to look very familiar. We've got adverbs,
passive voice, and simple word alternatives. Hemingway also flags up when
sentences are hard to read. Something that can
usually be remedied by breaking the sentence
up into shorter ones. Finally, an honourable mention
to Counting Characters. This handy little website counts the characters and words
in a piece of text. There's also a tool that checks the number of characters
in a webpage, and there's even
a Chrome web app that you can download. Handily, there's also a section
that tells you the maximum word count for the most popular
social media channels. I find it very useful to have all that information
in the same place. You can find links to
all these resources on the class description page. Now that you've
got all the tips, tricks and tools you need
to perfect your writing, it's time to look
at next steps and how to get started on
your class project.
14. Next Steps: Thank you for joining
this class and congratulations on all
your hard work. Together we've explored the world
of digital copywriting and emerged with a
better understanding of what makes great web copy. Now I invite you to share your work with our
community as a project. I'm excited to see how you've applied what
you've learned. If you need feedback
or have any questions, please don't hesitate
to reach out. If you found this class helpful, I encourage you to take a
moment and leave a review. Your feedback helps me
improve future classes, and it helps other students find classes that will suit
their learning needs. If you're hungry
for more knowledge, check out my other
Skillshare classes. If you want to boost your
social media writing skills, join my Social Media
Copywriting Masterclass, or give your SEO Copywriting
skills a boost with my comprehensive
masterclass covering all aspects of writing web copy that engages
your readers and ranks high on
search engines. These classes come packed with detailed tutorials,
real world examples, and professional
templates that will take your copywriting skills
to the next level. Visit my profile to see
all of my classes and hit Follow for updates when
I publish a new class. Thank you again for joining
me on this journey. It's been a privilege to
share my knowledge with you. Enjoy the rest of
your day and enjoy using your new digital
copywriting skills.
Ruth Clowes, Professional Copywriter
